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Pork Chops, with Onions
Season six nicely pared pork chops all over with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper.
Heat in a frying pan a tablespoon good lard; lay in the chops, one beside another, and fry for six minutes on each side. Dress on a hot dish and serve with fried onions, on top of the chops.
A plain chop-and-onion supper that assumes a thin cut and a very hot pan. Two things need translating: the thickness of the chop implied by a six-minute-a-side fry, and the missing recipe for the onions themselves.
- Chop thickness and donenessSix minutes a side suits a chop no more than about half an inch thick; a modern 1-inch loin chop cooked that way will be dry outside and undercooked at the bone. Cook to an internal 145F and rest five minutes, which for a thick chop usually means a shorter sear plus a few minutes over lower heat.
- "Nicely pared"This means trimming the chops of ragged edges and excess fat, not removing it all. Leave a thin fat cap and score it in two or three places so it does not curl the chop off the pan.
- LardA tablespoon of lard in a heavy skillet is still the best fat for this; it takes higher heat than butter. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works, though the flavour is flatter.
- White pepperHalf a teaspoon across six chops is a lot of white pepper by modern taste, and white pepper is more pungently musty than the black. Start with half that if it is unfamiliar to you.
- The fried onionsThe recipe gives none, assuming the cook knows: two or three onions sliced thin, cooked slowly in the pork fat until deep gold, 20 to 25 minutes. Start them before the chops and hold them warm, since the chops take only minutes and should not wait.
- Crowding the pan"One beside another" is the instruction that matters. Six chops in one pan will steam rather than brown unless the pan is genuinely large; work in two batches and wipe out any accumulated liquid between them.
- YieldSix chops, one per person, with the onions as the only accompaniment named. Potatoes, boiled or fried in the same fat, would sit well alongside.
Filippini's International Cook Book (1911) collects short entries like this one, written for a cook who already knows the basic operations and needs only the proportions and the order of work. Alexander Filippini spent decades at Delmonico's in New York, and his books carry that professional brevity: no pan size, no oven, just the sequence. Pork chops with fried onions is not anyone's national dish in particular, which is why it sits comfortably in a volume arranged alphabetically by dish with recipes gathered from many countries — it belongs to the general repertoire of European and American chop-house cooking, where a thin cut from the loin, fried fast in rendered pork fat and topped with slow-browned onions, was among the cheapest hot dishes a kitchen could send out quickly. The white pepper is a tell of the period and the training: French professional practice preferred it in pale dishes and sauces where black specks would show.